Broad Lefts conferencei

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Union leaders - a long way from the rank and file THE March 24 conference should provide a forum in which activists in many different unions can come together to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of what they have done and analyse just what should be involved in building Broad Lefts and how they can link up across It appears to me that there are several interlinked points in talking about building broad lefts in 1984.

The first is the complete inadequacy of the existing leadership of the unions. Like the First World War armies, capital and labour hammer away at each other. Vast sacrifices are made for a yard of ground. The Tories are gaining the ground because they are doing the attacking. But overall they cannot make a decisive breakthrough. Each onslaught, like the NGA and GCHQ, opens their defences to counter-attack. Our ark Starr reviews some issues NUPE general secretary Rodner Bickerstaffe towards winning the rank and file and achieving the ability to mobilise them. That's why the question to be addressed according to the concrete circumstances in different unions. In one situation, winning an official position may play us best to fight for the membership. In another it may be a distraction from that fight. It all depends. What is certain is that that fight cannot be shirked or bypassed. When we see the relative failure of the CPSA Broad Left to change the union or the way, faced with the Tory court injunction over Mercury, Broad Left members voted to accept it, I begin to wonder whether a lot of the spadework has been done.

I also think that the TGWU Broad Left suffers from this danger of electoralism minus the workplace building. And what's terrible about it is the way, once left candidates are elected, they make so little difference to the union's practice.

So we need a workplace